My First Husband's Wedding
A Poem for The Blossom to My Buttercup
Dear Friend,
Last weekend, my first husband married her soulmate.
If you didn’t grow up along the Zambezi riverbanks with me, this may be a difficult sentence to follow, so let me explain…
A Musical Wedding
When I was ten years old, my school put on a play — The Sound of Music — in which I played Maria, and my best friend, Cath, played Captain von Trapp. I have to appreciate our teachers knowing (in our small, religious farm school in Zimbabwe) that our chemistry would far outshine any boy-girl combination they might have put together.
For two nights, on a brightly-lit school stage, Cath and I performed one of the most famous musical romances, quoting almost the entire movie script word-for-word. We had dance numbers, and costume changes, and we even acted out the wedding ceremony, with me in a lacy dress and veil and her in a pencilled-on moustache and bow tie. There were nuns in the background. It was legit.
So, I think I can safely say that Cath was my first husband, and I her first wife.
After all, for years before this play, she was the Blossom to my Buttercup, the Ninetales to my Squirtle, the Pink Power Ranger to… whichever Power Ranger wasn’t boring that week. Cath was a force to be reckoned with, even then. She introduced me to Tamagotchi’s and, much later, to excessive quantities of Smirnoff Ice. We have matching underarm scars where we covered ourselves in ‘Magic Potion’ — glitter mixed with something highly poisonous, apparently — and I saved her from getting expelled from high school at least three times. (It was the fourth time that got her.)
We met at my fifth birthday party, and for the next thirteen years, we were each other’s most constant person. I won’t say there weren’t fights (oh boy), or that we always understood each other perfectly, but in the irreversible way of childhood, Cath was my first love: the first person who wasn’t family that I knew I couldn’t afford to lose.
A Real Wedding
At one point, Cath had quite shiny dreams, with keywords like Hollywood and celebrity. And I loved this for her, though I didn’t fully understand it. It felt like the idea of a dream, rather than a dream itself. I am often guilty of those sorts of ambitions: the ones you could easily spend your life on, because they are less feasible and therefore less terrifying than the ones you can actually hold in your hands.
Yet, just seven days ago, the girl with red carpets on her vision board got her veil caught on a twig on her way up her wedding aisle, and she laughed.
(Her now-husband Dan did not laugh. He half thought she was turning around to leave!)
Dan may have spent most of his life in England, but with him, Cath has become the most Zambian version of herself — the most free, the most weird, the most comfortable. Together, they have moved back to Livingstone to live on almost the same stretch of river where she and I used to play. They are creating a life here, running a company, raising a dribbly Great Dane and a wild, mango-coloured cat.
Cath and Dan were married with sand in their shoes, on a plot of acacia scrub and jackalberry trees where the elephants roam, and they are planning to build their home. Before the wedding, she said to me, ‘I bet no bride has ever spent this much of her wedding week talking about fences.’
What could be more real than fences?
And Landrovers that break down the day before your wedding? An Out of Office that only gives you a week before you have to get back to people, because you’re running your own business and can’t afford to go silent, even to get married?
And since Cath had asked me to write a poem to read during the ceremony, and then said she didn’t want to hear it before the day, I needed to find a way, somehow, to capture the realness of this moment, of the commitment they were making to each other, of the life they had ahead of them.
Luckily, they had done most of the work for me already…
RETURN TO THE WILD
It is not pretty, love like this.
You might think it is, because of this view
and Dan’s still unripped suit,
and the way Cath’s veil is at once as exquisite and as dramatic
as her personality.
But a love like this is a wild thing,
with blood in its teeth and dirt in its paws.
So today, we are watching two people return to the wild.
See how they shed their English skins
for sexy khaki shorts and shiny sunglass ties?
Watch as they burn their escape bridges
along with dreams of one day getting with a Jonas brother (Cath),
or building a career as a tap-dancing trumpet player (Dan).
Like their chosen country, they are rejecting electricity
for the steady heat and hug of a circle fire.
They have chosen a home that is just unfinished fences along a riverbank,
tamed a wild horse as a dog, built a life carving trails with tusks and paws.
They are making the maddest choice: picking a mate for life,
trusting in the terror of falling for another weird, wild thing
and choosing to tie no rope, nor thread, nor harness to it.
Instead, they picked each other for their impossibilities,
for the feral ways they move through the world,
for the frustrations they carry and the mistakes they are yet to achieve.
One day, and despite a twenty-step skincare routine,
their faces will weather in the Zambian sun.
They will wrinkle into little maps that tell the story of their lives:
Imperfect, scarred, entirely beloved.
They will remember only words like herd, and pack, and flock, and pod.
They will forget how to compare or measure,
start looking only to the next sweet fruit, the next steep climb,
the tail they hold in front of them, the soft step of their friend beside.
It is not pretty, love like this.
Pretty has nothing to do with why wild things thrive.
Today, we celebrate as two people return to the wild.
Many Love Stories
It turns out my first marriage has been far outshone by Cath’s real one, and that Dan is the wife Cath deserves. But his best men gave a brilliant speech that evening where they took turns to try not to cry when they said how much they loved him, and I was reminded of how many love stories we each collect in our lives. Yet only one version ends up at the end of an aisle.
Dan has his own first loves, though I doubt Jeff or Max ever stood in a wedding dress and said I do like I did. The marquee was full of them that night: friends, siblings, parents, cousins. It seems when it comes to who we love, we never leave the wild. We need the herd, the pack, the flock, the pod… maybe even the dancefloor.
It can be easy to forget how many love stories we are already a part of. I wonder if you know which are your greatest ones?
With love,
Tasha x
Beautiful, I’m crying again!
It was a PERFECT poem. ❤️ Such a lovely post. ✨